What is the Jacamar Door?

I chose the name “Jacamar Door” for this site because it’s an image of new life that makes some sense of our chaotic world. The Great Jacamar is a bird that lays its eggs in termites’ nests, basically in a pretty hostile environment. The termites seal in the eggs and enter into a strange symbiotic relationship with them: one in which some eggs are lost — eaten by their hosts — and some are left to develop. When the remaining eggs are ready to hatch, the Jacamar returns to the termite nest, pecking out a doorway through which the baby birds are released from the dark, into a new world of light and freedom.

This seems to me a fitting symbol for our lives of spirit in this beautiful world, which can be at once so kind to us and yet so intolerably cruel. There will be suffering and sacrifice, there will be unconscionable loss, but there will also be the nurture, love, freedom, and release of a life lived in spirit. Godspeed for your journeys into the light!